


Genius has its Limits

by firstbreaths



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Politics, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 04:43:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6359770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstbreaths/pseuds/firstbreaths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being the President’s daughter comes with a lot of benefits. Lydia would be lying if she said that Stiles Stilinski, the son of a Secret Service Agent, isn’t one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genius has its Limits

**Author's Note:**

  * For [missgoalie75](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missgoalie75/gifts).



Lydia would be lying if she said she hated state dinners.

It’s not that she likes them, either, but – 

She has a routine down now; find the youngest guy in the room, usually the son of a diplomat who’s as bored as she is, flash them the wide smile she otherwise reserves for paparazzi and Nobel Prize winners she doesn’t think  _really_ deserve their accolades (so far she’s met two) _,_ and then see whether she can convince them to make out with her in the hidden cloak room off the main dance floor for ten minutes. Her success rate is about 70:30, but that includes two guys that  _she’d_ made the decision to ditch because they didn’t understand chemistry of the theoretical or the physical kind (or their total lack thereof), so –

She’d much rather be getting ahead on her independent study for Quantum Mechanics, or taking a long bath and catching up on a trashy novel, but Lydia has learned to take what she can get.  

Tonight, however, she’s seated next to a guy, about her age, who introduces himself as ‘Mr Stilinski’ and then, when Lydia raises her eyebrow, amends this to say, “I didn’t think ‘Stiles’ was a particularly Presidential nickname.”

“Well it’s a good thing neither of us is the President then,  _Stiles_ ,” Lydia replies, raising her wine glass. He gives her a startled glance, and then clinks his glass with hers in a toast. 

Stiles is kind of cute, his eyes crinkle when he laughs and his fringe is curling at the ends where he’d obviously tried to flatten it with water beforehand; his suit is a little too big at the shoulders, mostly likely borrowed from whichever of the stuffy dignitaries in the room is his father.  It occurs to her, faintly, that this could be  _way_ too easy, which she takes as the first sign that it probably won’t be. There’s something about the way he smiles, his mouth confident in its softness, that feels like a reassurance she didn’t know she needed.

Besides, Stiles, it turns out, is rewarding for reasons  _other_  than his mouth. Well, sort of; Stiles leans over, halfway through the entrée and whispers “so, actual question: what’s slipperier, the Norwegian PM or these mushrooms?”

Lydia hides her laugh with her hand as she replies, “definitely the mushrooms. The PM will lose all his charm the minute his toupee comes loose.”

“Right,” Stiles says, “I forgot you do this all time. I also think it’s odd that you do this all the time and don’t complain about the mushrooms. Shit. I’m really fixated on the damn mushrooms. Is that weird, that I’m fixated on the mushrooms?”

“It wasn’t, until you mentioned it,” and then, because she’s not a  _complete_ bitch (unless you’re that guy in her Thursday lab class who never cleans out the beakers properly; although, it turns out having two Secret Service agents flexing their muscles behind you makes people follow the lab manual), “but you’re right, I would  _kill_ for some real food right now.”

“Is that an option?”

“Well, we could see what’s in the kitchens,” Lydia says, glancing towards the corridor that leads in that direction. The dining hall is suddenly incredibly stuffy, and she needs to  _breathe_. “But firstly, which of our esteemed guests is your parent?”

She glances around the room, calculating quickly about whether or not it’s safe to disappear further away than her usual trysts in the cloak room. The New Zealand Ambassador is half-blind and just as deaf; the Japanese Trade Minister looks like he might pass out every time her mom so much as glances in his direction, and she’s already charmed the entire Brazilian delegation with her rapid-fire Portuguese (she’d kept up perfectly until they started talking about soccer). So unless he’s  _French_ \-  

“None of them,” Stiles says, jerking a thumb towards the closed door into the room. “New head of your mom’s protection detail actually, appointed from the VP’s team. He’s outside, making sure no one can get in.”

Lydia runs her tongue across her teeth, thinking about that for a second.

“Secret Service?” she asks, finally. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here.” 

“My best friend Scott and his mom are out of town, and my dad thinks I’m going to blow the house up if I so much as try to boil a pot of water, so he couldn’t leave me home alone. Your mom – the  _President_ \- laughed for five minutes and then said I had to come tonight when she found out, apparently.” Stiles flashes her a sudden grin that’s all teeth, and she finds herself returning it; she knows her mom feels bad about how much the Presidency has impacted her life sometimes, wants her to meet others her own age more easily. “If it makes you feel better, my dad would probably be disappointed if he  _didn’t_ catch me trying to run off with the President’s daughter, since I know he’s got a speech prepared in his head for that exact scenario.” 

Stiles looks entirely  _too_ serious about the whole thing, and Lydia bites down on a laugh.  

“Well in that case, I can’t offer you a full meal, or anything, but the White House is committed enough to upholding American exceptionalism that there should be a bottle of Dr Pepper in the fridge?” Lydia says, and she stands up, pushes her chair back, and pushes her way through the crowd of diplomats starting to gather on the dance floor, beckoning for Stiles to follow her.   

They make their way to an unused kitchen (why this section of the White House needs two, Lydia will never know), earning only a quick glance from one of the waiters who she knowswon’t tell – the White House is  _full_ of unspoken codes that she’s been filing away for a potential psychological study one day – and Lydia opens the fridge and grabs a bottle of Dr Pepper from the top shelf, passing it to Stiles, who’s just glancing around like he can’t believe this is his life.

It’s been three years, but she understands the feeling, so she turns away to let him have his moment.

They sit on the prep bench, passing the bottle between them, and Lydia tries to not to watch the way the muscles of Stiles’ throat stretch taut as he swallows, or the way he can’t sit still, his fingers tapping a staccato beat against the countertop. Lydia toes off her heels and lets them fall to the floor, her ankle knocking against Stiles’ every few minutes as they both idly swing their legs. The conversation flows easily between them; Stiles, it turns out, is a freshman at American University, majoring in maybe biology, or maybe government, or maybe whatever his best friend Scott decides to do, although he says that one’s a joke,  _mostly_. He asks her questions, too: when did she first become interested in science; who’s her favourite female physicist; has she ever thought about taking Intro to US Government as a joke?

“No,” she says, “but I forced them to let me test out of AP US History in high school. I never really spoke up in class, but when I handed in my first test I may have gone a little overboard.” Stiles quirks an eyebrow. “You  _can’t_ understand Lincoln’s legacy without understanding where he fits in the context of every President who came before or after him. I don’t believe in shortcuts.”

Being the President’s daughter has gotten her so many offers, so many contacts and free books and potential PhD offers that Lydia has taken them all – and then worked ten times harder at home to make up for it.

“So let me get this straight,” Stiles says, tilting his head to face her, “you actually  _really_ understand particle physics beyond like, being able to recognise Albert Einstein, and now you’re telling me that you could name all the Presidents in order  _before_ you came to the White House and had to stare at their ugly mugs every time you eat breakfast?” His jaw drops. “You’re a genius. Why are  _you_ not President?”

“You’re the one who called me a genius,” she says blithely, like she’s not acutely aware that the strength of her smile could split her face in two if she let it. “Not much time to become a Fields Medallist when you’re stuck charming Senators and resolving international territorial disputes.”

“Right,” he agrees, a beat too quickly, “but like, Thomas Jefferson was a renowned polymath, and Bill Clinton found time to cheat on his wife, so if anyone could do it, you could.” Stiles frowns, his eyebrows furrowing. “Be a genius, that is, not cheat on, uh–“ he waves his left hand vaguely – “whoever it is you might cheat on.”

“You could too, you know?” Lydia says, because she’s not sure what else to say to that.

“What?”

“Do… whatever you wanted.” She smiles softly, because there’s something about Stiles, the way he holds himself, that makes her want to make sure that he knows this. “You know how I know that?”

“How?” Stiles replies, sucking in a breath.

“When we were talking about female physicists, you weren’t even shocked when I mentioned someone other than Marie Curie.”

“Oh, uh,” Stiles holds up his phone, which she hadn’t even noticed he was holding; there’s a Safari tab open. “I can’t, like, decode complex mathematical equations or whatever, but I’m very good at looking things up.” He waves the phone in her face. “Did you know that Shirley Ann Jackson celebrated her tenth anniversary of her Presidency at the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute with an Aretha Franklin concert?”

He puts his phone down, picks up the now half-empty Dr Pepper bottle and takes another swig. Lydia tries not to notice how close their thighs are to touching as she says, “I did, actually,” before Stiles launches into the chorus of ‘Respect’, screwing his face up as he tries to hit the high note at the end.  

Lydia’s thirty feet away from a room full of Very Important Foreign Diplomats (their emphasis, not hers), listening to the kid of a Secret Service Agent butchering a classic song and, for the first time in a while, she doesn’t regret a thing. Even if she’s  _just_ self-aware enough to know she won’t admit that to herself for a while, just yet.

Eventually, she glances down at her watch, realising that they should head back before the Ambassador of Japan  _does_ fall head-first into his dessert and the diplomatic circle-jerk that her mom is presiding over dies down enough for someone to discover they’re missing. She slides off the countertop and slips back into her heels and then, on a whim, turns to face Stiles. With him still planted on the bench, Dr Pepper bottle still awkwardly trapped in his right hand, and her in her heels, they’re the roughly the same height so she leans in and places a hand on his thigh, plants a feather light kiss on Stiles’ cheek. Stiles’ body jerks under her palm, for just a second, and then he leans forward, almost toppling off the counter, and presses his lips to her cheek. She can feel the curve of his smile resting against her jaw. 

It’s weirdly intimate; and she’s stuck her tongue down the throat of the Danish ambassador’s son without a modicum of shame before.

The moment is broken, though, when he says, “there’s no  _code_ to this thing, right? Like, I can tell my best friend that the First Daughter lured me with her offer of highly carbonated fizzy drinks and her Nobel Prize worthy brain, and I’m not going to get arrested, or anything… right?” 

“You’re the one with a Secret Service agent for a father, why don’t you ask him?” Lydia says, taking a step back. She breathes through her nose to compose herself. “Or better yet, look it up?” 

And then, she slips her hand into his, pulls him down from the counter, and leads him back out in the ballroom.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr [@firstbreaths](http://firstbreaths.tumblr.com).


End file.
